Biography

Michael Meacher is a Labour Party Politican. In the 2010 General Election the people of Oldham West and Royton voted for Michael Meacher to be their MP. The party received 19503 votes - 45.45 percent majority

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Voting Summary

Immigration:

Voted moderately for making the asylum system stricter by tightening the criteria for acceptance, setting tougher rules for allowable activities and making it easier for government agencies to remove asylum seekers.

Europe:

Voted moderately against holding another referendum on membership of the European Union.

NHS:

Voted very strongly against GP Commissioning in the NHS (the policy that GPs should buy services such as out of hours care, ambulance services and hospital care on behalf of their patients).

Welfare:

Voted moderately against the UK state reducing spending on social security and welfare benefits, including state assistance provided via the tax system.

Increase Income Tax:

Voted strongly for increasing the top rate of income tax.

Increase VAT:

Voted moderately against increasing VAT.

Terrorism:

Voted a mixture of for and against making the crime known as “Terrorism” different from murder and conspiracy to murder, having have its own special category for which the normal rights not to be detained without charge or trial can be summarily suspended at the whim of the Government.

Climate change:

Voted moderately for making the laws which enforce Climate Change policy as strong as possible.

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Recent Appearances

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many asylum seekers the Government plans to resettle in (a) Oldham, (b) Rochdale, (c) all 10 Greater Manchester metropolitan boroughs, (d) London and (e) the South East.

This is a Bill of naked discrimination against the trade unions, designed to cut the funding of the Labour party severely and, thus, to entrench the Tory party in power, as well as to make it almost impossible to strike in certain industrial sectors. However, it is worth quoting the stated purposes of the Bill, which the Government pretend are their motives. The first is to

“pursue our ambition to become the most prosperous major economy in the world by 2030”.

That is beyond satire. The truth is that after seven years of austerity following the great crash wages are still 6% below pre-crash levels, productivity is flat, the FTSE 100 companies are not investing and household debt is now tipping £2 trillion. The idea that after this Bill we will be overtaking Germany and the United States in the next 15 years is ludicrous.

The Government’s second “reason” for this Bill is to

“ensure hardworking people are not disrupted by little-supported strike action”.

The best answer to that was that given by The Times commentator, Philip Collins, on the day the Bill was presented, on . He said:

“Strike action, fox hunting, the BBC, Europe, migrant benefits. The Tory ability to identify things that are not problems, then attack them.”

The truth is that the number of days lost to strike action now is less than one tenth of what it was in the 1980s. Of far greater importance to the state of the economy is the chronic underinvestment in skills. This Bill, while obnoxious, is utterly irrelevant to the key problems of this country. The tube workers aside, only teachers and firefighters have caused any real national concern since 2010, and even they normally did so only one day at a time. Even the resistance of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers to plans for keeping the underground open all night are not that unreasonable. Night shifts are unsociable, unhealthy and potentially dangerous as they lead to over-tiredness. But the central point here is not acknowledged in the Bill. The Government seem to believe that whenever a strike occurs, it is always the fault of the workers irrespective of what the employer has done.

It is true that most employers are probably decent and reasonable, but there are a distinct minority of them who are intransigent and who behave thoroughly unreasonably and badly. To penalise and intimidate workers in such cases, when it is the employer who has overwhelmingly caused the breakdown in industrial relations, is wholly unfair and wrong. The last thing that the workers want to do is to go on strike, but when they have genuine, reasonable and pressing demands over such essential issues such as job losses, safety problems and pay, and those demands are swept to one side, as they often are, with little or no negotiation, they have no alternative but to take industrial action. To blame and penalise them and not bad management, as the Tory party and its pals in the media automatically do, is a total charade. The conditions for industrial action are prohibitive. The net effect of all these measures is to make it impossible to strike.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, with reference to the allocation of commissioning resources for 2015-16, for what reason the allocation for (a) NHS Oldham is 49 per cent below target, (b) Greater Manchester is two per cent below target, (c) NHS Isle of Wight is 18.02 per cent above target, (d) NHS West London is 31.52 per cent above target and (e) NHS Westminster is 26.24 per cent above target; and if he will make a statement.

Numerology

Has received answers to written questions in the last year, well above average amongst MPs.

People have made annotations on this MP’s speeches, well above average amongst MPs.

Has voted in parliament in of votes, ranking th out of MPs.

Has rebelled against their party in debates in the last year, ranking th out of MPs.

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